I remember a colleague who’s relationship was starting to get serious had a couple of reservations as, “She’s got some issues.”
My response was, “Everybody’s got baggage. You have to figure out if your baggage and her baggage make a matching set.”
I’ve been married twenty-one years, and neither of us are the same two people who got married all that time ago. There have been times when we’ve discussed if the two people we’ve become should stay married. There’s been times when love is strained, times when things are just comfortable, and times when my heart still beats faster when she walks in the room.
The number one piece of advice that I received that has stood the test of time is being able to communicate. If you are able to share with each other your dreams, fantasies, desires, fears, faults and foibles, you have a relationship that can be built on and can last.
I would be highly interested in a study that analyzes people who have been married for 50+ years and compares them to people who have been divorced. I have some opinions on what leads people to ultimately get divorced; however, without any evidence to back them up, those thoughts aren't even worth mentioning.
My belief is that marriage (at least for me personally) is a lifelong commitment, and divorce is only an option in the cases of abuse or cheating. In that sense, my biggest fear toward getting married is that the person I marry would at some point change who they are ("get bored" in modern parlance) and divorce me.
At this stage in my life (24 years old), I'm slowly realizing that I probably won't ever get married even though I would really like to... I just can't imagine meeting a person I feel so certain and comfortable about. Heck, I can barely even find someone I want to date.
I was speaking with my sister (engaged) the other day and asked her how she knew she had met the right person, and she told me that her fiancé is the only guy ever that she felt like she wasn't playing "mind games" with. That's particularly interesting to me, because I've never been with someone who I didn't feel like I was playing those games with.
This part about the "mind games" is interesting. I think it always starts like that because that's how we learned to seduce. That's how "love" is documented. I remember reading in "Les liaisons dangeureuses" something along those lines : "Don't show her you like her, it will confuse her".
In my experience mind games stop when you fall in love. I remember being with one who at one point asked me "Can we stop playing games?" and I agreed.
further: I could have stayed with her if I had continued the mind games. I'm sure of that. But how long would that have lasted? Not forever. Better stop the mind game early and see how long it goes if you feel like it's the one. Maybe that's the true test.
I really don't know if culture twist our interactions toward mind games or if it is a natural law (that may be amplified by immaturity or society too) at first, as a shallow way to test before going deeper.
As someone who didn't get married until he was 37, I can tell you not to count yourself out. I thought I would never get married up until I was in my mid 30s. No one can predict the future.
Scientific research on successful vs unsuccessful long term relationships has already been done by the Gottmann Institution. You can get a good presentation of the findings here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLXX8wzvT7c
My warning from bitter personal experience: Don't go into a long term relationship without learning from Gottman first!
1. Marry the first person you meet whom you could happily be married to. Don't settle; make sure you could happily be married to the person, but don't pass up an acceptable partner.
2. Stop worrying about whether you could have met someone better.
Satisficers are happier than maximizers. Don't be a maximizer.
Yes, and that threshold is the boolean I'm talking about. He says
"Marry the first person you meet whom you could happily be married to"
Which implies that for each person, either you could be happily married to them or you could not be happily married to them. My point is that there are probably many people who you could marry and increase your happiness, but that doesn't necessarily mean you should marry the first one you encounter, because of the significant opportunity cost.
Worrying about "opportunity cost" is maximizing, and people who maximize are less happy than people who satisfice because instead of enjoying what they have, they worry about the possibility of getting something better.
It seems that satisficers would only be happier if they are good both at setting their threshold and at predicting the happiness of each option. And of course, setting a threshold requires a consideration of opportunity cost, so you don't get to hand wave that away.
Satisficers don't care whether there's a potentially better option though. That's the definition of satisficing, and it makes most consideration of opportunity cost go away.
It's a little hard to apply in practice because a.) nobody knows just how many candidates there will be in their lifetime and b.) your idea of who the "best" candidate will be changes over time, based on your life experiences. Someone who you thought annoyingly plain in college may be a great life partner 10 years later, while the girl who was fun and exciting in college seems more than just a little crazy if she's still doing the same stuff a decade later.
There's also the question of evolving mate quality. Are the people who are available at 30 worse in quality than at 20, as most people tend to believe ("all the good ones" are or get "taken")? Or are they better (which is possible, too)?
It did seem, as a man, that women with good personalities improved with age, but that women with average or bad personalities became worse. Age seems to spread people out, in that way, but the well-adjusted people being selected out tended to push down the mode. There were a lot of women I dated in their late 20s who had way too many psychological cigarette burns from Biffs and Jedds ("two D's because..."). Partners of low moral character definitely do lasting damage-- that's obvious in all genders-- and women have more opportunity to get fucked up (and fucked literally) than men in college and their early 20s.
That said, "all the good ones are taken" is probably more panic than reality. I remember in college, people used to descend on the freshman girls "before they get snapped up". It's a fucked-up way to think and maybe it actually has the opposite effect of taking bad people out of the market, because only a fucked-up person would think that for a college senior to stalk September-frosh ("froshing", it was called) is OK.
I'm 29, turning 30 in a few weeks, but I'm meeting more women now, and in general it seems that most have grown up, so much so that I wonder where these women were in my early 20's. I mean I had my growing up to do as well, but I was never big into the college party scene etc.
Hmm... I think it's probably (at least) a bimodal distribution. Some of the untaken ones are untaken because they have issues that render them unappealing for a long term relationship (physical attractiveness is far from the only criterion, by the way). Others may be highly appealing, but have such high standards of their own that they haven't yet met anyone who qualifies.
If you like active, professional women, you also have the phenomena of many women entering the "serious relationship" pool around age 30 because they spent their twenties traveling, or concentrating on their career, or getting advanced degrees, all of which take a significant amount of focus and often involve life changes which tend to end existing relationships.
This is a topic that's really sensitive, and what kinds of experiences "permanently ruin" someone, and which can be bounced back from, are subjective and hotly debated, so... I'll try to tread lightly. And I really hate the stud/slut dichotomy. If a woman who hung out with typical frat boys in college and got flash-lighted is untouchable, then why aren't those frat boys, who did the flash-lighting, likewise? They should be. The idea that horrible men are "cool" because they "got away with it" is revolting. That double standard makes me angry.
The problem isn't physically abusive partners alone. There's more to it than that. If dating a jerk or a crazy person or even a physically abusive person made someone "permanently damaged" there'd be almost no one left.
The main issue that is gendered is that women have more opportunities, when they're young, to involve themselves with really terrible people and for things to go seriously wrong. We're all bad judges of character when we're really young. The typical 15-year-old boy isn't any morally better than a 15-year-old girl, and would probably make choices that would destroy him if given the chance... but typical 15-year-old boys are considered unattractive (even to girls of the same age) and don't get those opportunities. I was a fucking idiot at that age, but no one wanted to be a fucking idiot with me. For women... it's a different story. The opportunities to make really bad choices and ruin yourself, if you're a young woman, are quite available.
I don't think it's even sex itself that does the damage. I used to think that, but I think casual social contact is what erodes the person's values. Being around bad people makes a person bad. What makes college casual sex evil isn't the sex itself (the sex is vanilla) but the acquisitive, manipulative, and dishonest culture around it. I have no problem with swingers or people in open relationships or above-board promiscuous adults, because there's nothing gross or wrong about sex itself. But the culture around college casual sex (the alcohol abuse, the focus on man as conquerer and woman as defeated, the "gray rape" that isn't "gray" at all, the fights, the "pickup artist" nonsense, and the reward of bad behavior in both sexes) is pretty disgusting.
The traditional solution to this problem is that the father and/or brother would protect the young woman and maim or kill the louts who would try manipulate and take advantage of her. Colleges also had the power of "In loco parentis" to prevent parties that were full of alcohol abuse and casual sex. All such powers were stripped by law in the late 60's and 70's with the results you see now. So if you want to see this problem fixed you would need either to return to patriarchy, or invent some novel way of guiding the young down the right path.
The 1/e concept doesn't quite apply. First of all, the "Secretary Problem" assumes a binary payoff structure: +1.0 for getting the absolute best and 0.0 for getting anyone else (and maximizes the EV at 1/e). However, for most people, getting the 2nd-best theoretical potential mate is quite a bit better than ending up alone (especially because people and preferences change, making the concept of "best potential mate" sketchy; the person you want most at 17 is probably a bad lifelong match.)
Let's look at it, though. For the first 15-20 years (subject to debate) you don't know anything about this problem. You don't know who you are, everyone's changing fast, you're blinded by sexual desire, etc. For the last 30 years, your reproductive viability is reduced for men and zero for women. This puts the "choosing window" at, say, 20 to 50. That would mean that one doesn't settle down until 32 at the absolute earliest, and that most people would do so in their 40s (and have only a few years to bear children). Most people don't want to wait that long to settle down, and for good reasons.
One major one is that the pool of available singles declines in quality as you get older. The Secretary Problem assumes a uniform distribution of quality over time. It's not true (and, in fact, insulting) to say that "all the good ones are taken", but I definitely noticed a change in the average quality of dates from 20 to 26 (when I met my wife and left the dating game). You still can find great people at any age, but the distribution evolves. Because people improve with age (fuck VCs and how they think about that) there's some push at the high end, but that's not offset by the disproportionate rate at which either (a) "the good ones" are taken, or (b) the messed-up people become better at hiding themselves, which is my preferred theory.
(I have no idea whether that decline of available mate quality continues after 26, or if it levels off or even reverses. I know some high-quality people who are single at 40, but have no concept of the aggregate dating scene at that age.)
Empirically, people don't "hold out" during 1/e of their window because, unlike with the Secretary Problem, the payoff in choosing the 2nd or 3rd-best theoretical match is quite high (maybe 0.8 to 0.99) compared to the payoff (0.0 by definition) of never meeting someone as good as the best during your hold-out period.
> Empirically, people don't "hold out" during 1/e of their window because, unlike with the Secretary Problem, the payoff in choosing the 2nd or 3rd-best theoretical match is quite high (maybe 0.8 to 0.99) compared to the payoff (0.0 by definition) of never meeting someone as good as the best during your hold-out period.
The 2nd or 3rd-best theoretical match could also have a negative payoff (divorces you, takes half your money + child support + alimony). You can lose a lot more marrying the wrong person than never marrying at all.
Wow if that's true then marriage is just a horrible bet. Let's say you would date 10 potential marriage partners - you're saying that only one of them would have an outcome better than divorcing you and taking half your money and your kids? I wouldn't even consider marriage as a possibility if the odds were that bad.
There is a variant of the secretary problem that assumes a different payoff structure - each secretary has a payoff which is uniformly distributed U(0,A) for unknown A. As I recall, the stopping time is O(sqrt(N)).
The bigger difference is that there is no set time where you have to choose whether to marry someone. You can, for example, go back to dating someone you dated previously and then decide to marry them.
One of the greatest privileges of being on one’s own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with.
... as spoken by a philosopher, one of the most professionally distant stereotypes of mind. Engagement is hard, mmkay? You only get out what you put in to life. Risk aversion is hardly dashing.
This speaks to the real issue here. There's no right or wrong person to marry, it's a matter of compatability, and how willing two people are to resolve issues. Also, the question of friendship as well.
People are always compatible, if they have to. That is why rampant marriage failure is a cultural problem, not an individual one. Therefore, if you just avoid to pick someone from the wrong (western) community, you should already be ok.
They partly diagnose some of the dysfunctions of marriage, but their prescription that we should psychoanalyze the "candidates" (as if you can treat a good person that casually) and try to match ourselves based on some kind of psychological compatibility is nuts.
The reasons marriages are failing so much these days is that we live in a culture that does not value, or even understand, what marriage is. Marriage works when both partners treat it as a lifelong partnership and they work to overcome their problems. If you were to engineer a marriage between two people with perfectly matched personality types, phobias, etc, they'd still end up divorced in a few years if they've been taught to think of marriage as a temporary exchange of romantic favors "until I get bored" or "until something better comes along".
I too thought some of the prescriptions were a little strange, but I think the author brought it down to earth with:
We need a new set of criteria. We should wonder:
- how are they mad
- how can one raise children with them
- how can one develop together
- how can one remain friends
What is marriage? I thought that one of the primary concepts behind it is that it's a "commitment". (If it's not that, what is it?)
However, if you change that to "we'll keep doing this until we don't feel like doing it", that's not really much of a commitment anymore, is it? After all, doing something you enjoy doing until you don't feel like doing it anymore, is pretty much what you do anyway, by default.
What is marriage, really, except a promise to try and keep going and work things through, even when you don't want to anymore?
It seems almost pathological to commit to continuing to do something even when you don't want to do it anymore. And there's no way to predict how you will feel in that regard a couple years later. What is the point of making a promise like that? I'm not arguing for the parent's more lax stance on the commitment of marriage; I'm just saying I don't see why people choose to marry to begin with.
I don't think that the reasons for marrying are as far removed from primate (or mammal, or animal in general) mate selection as people think they are.
Or more likely, people don't realize at all the degree to which their behaviors and decisions are instinctual, and are confusing the rationalizations that are layered on top for the actual explanation.
For that matter, if the couple procreates, they have validated whatever biological forces brought them together, regardless of their happiness or longevity.
Neither is anything at all like the decades-long commitment of a good marriage. While it may seem like sex is the main feature (and it is important), as someone who maintained a relationship for twenty years (she passed away five years ago) I can assure you that it's far from the only factor involved.
I am led to believe that human marriage is much more than just animal mating. In a liberal society, such as the western countries, where mating before marriage is common, I don't think there is any confusion between the two.
Your comment might be more applicable to eastern societies where mating before marriage is taboo. One only get to mate with the one they "chose" to marry.
The best method to not merry wrong person - do not marry because its the best option you have.
Reasoning have no saying in love.
Just follow your true gut - thats good enough. Your subconscious already know if the person is good or not for you. And subconscious never follows social demand, but truly best option for you.
If you gut says - dont, but your reasoning says yes - then you are up for a really bad time if you follow second.
This is a really bizarre romantic notion.
So your brain is actually divided into 2 brains that are thinking independently and one that you have identified as 'gut' is superior in matters of choosing a partner?
Let me say this.
Go with this thought - after the wedding it will be just a downhill and all the bad things in your partner will become worse.
If you can live with that - cool, go and marry your partner. But if you honestly will think about it and think like "it will be better" or "he/she will change/stay the same" or "after wedding it will be much better" - you are screwed.
You cannot bet your life on "it will be only better". Those things dont work like that, I see way to many people divorcing because they made this bet.
I hate the way to young people marrying out of "it makes sense" while guy goes to strip clubs every weekend and girls dream about some sexy guy taking them for a date. Its sick and sounds like pathology. Its really, really wrong.
Mortgage/Taxes is not the reason to get married. Love is. If you call me romantic, I am sorry, but it seems you didnt really seen true love.
I think reasoning can convince us of anything. The sky is green, grass is blue, etc. People can make themselves believe anything, and sometimes if we get lonely/desperate enough, we rationalize someone's obvious incompatibilities away.
I was engaged once and everything in me knew that she was wrong for me, I thought that if I never gave someone a chance, so to speak, I'd be alone for the rest of my life.
Well we all have to make sacrifices in a partner, but when there is this overarching feeling that you're with the wrong person, then, you're probably with the wrong person.
I think the more conscious decisions you're making about someone, the more likely you are to be wrong, but that's my 2 cents.
Edit: My ex-fiancee was the one who gave up long before I did, when I was still trying to make things work.
> In a wiser society, prospective partners would put each other through detailed psychological questionnaires and send themselves off to be assessed at length by teams of psychologists.
My wife and I did premarital counseling. I highly recommend it. We learned a lot about ourselves, each other, and us as a couple.
(We did it with our pastor and a couple we respected. But I recommend it regardless of religious ideology.)
I read a paper that studied why some marriages work. The author concluded that in those marriages, the couple worked to calm each other. I've used that in my relationships and it has worked well. I make an agreement with my partner upfront that we must make sure that one of us stays calm when the other is angry and the angry person can't harm/insult/embarrass/etc the calm person. The angry person should explain how they feel without resorting to name calling or abusing the other person. If both of us become angry then we must separate until one of us can be calm. With that algorithm, no one gets hurt in an argument and arguments don't escalate into destructive events.
My relationships are still limited by the fact that couples must "agree to disagree". This piles up and eventually there are too many disagreements to ignore.
Unfortunately in the US we have a divorce industry that spends billions of dollars on advertising targeting mostly women, but also men with attempts to normalize divorce or even to make it seem fashionable.
Basically if you look at the hard data and examine the strong correlation between the aggregate divorce related TV advertising spend over the last 50 hears and the number of divorces in the USA a clear picture begins to emerge.
This is just another marketing success story where PR firms spent billions to educate a market.. to help the divorce industry reach "product / market fit"
Or: The divorce industry has been a significant help in reducing the stigma associated with divorce, such that people can now make their own decisions without the societal pressure to stay in an unhappy marriage.
Through well measured advertising campaigns they changed the definition of what a "happy marriage" means so that it's new meaning aligns more closely with the idea of being in a satisfactory employment situation. Everyone knows that it's not a good idea to jump from job to job too quickly, but if you've been at the same company for a long time, and a much better seeming opportunity presents itself.. then in today's world.. thanks to the PR spin machine and the divorce industry.. jumping ship seems like the only sensible thing to do, after all lets not forget that there's a huge cash reward involved which will more than cover the cost the attorneys fees many times over.
Marriage has been reduced to a transaction, a mere token in the consumer economy. The big question in my mind is, was this multi-billion dollar, multi-generational PR campaign coordinated out of greed by the divorce industry or is it an attempt by sinister forces to gradually bend the zeitgeist of western civilization in a certain ?dehumanizing? direction ? I suppose attempting to trace causation is not the most efficient means by which to remedy the situation, but yet these thoughts arise.
It is too much for me to marry for purely Romantic reason. I like the idea of marriages in the past. I want to look at a prospective partner's land, property, ownership, if we are on a similar cultural field, any potential alliances, education and so on.
This is a good list of hypotheses... but shouldn't the article attempt to support these claims with some numbers to back it up or evaluations from experts? Feels a little hollow as it is.
What you just described would increase the amount of work involved by a factor of 10 (in round numbers). So "should" it? Given that you paid nothing for it, the better question is why should anyone give a fig about what you think if all you have to day is "Interesting, but how about doing a lot more work...for free."
If you're truly interested, why don't you get in touch with the writer, tell him what you'd like to know, and ask how much he'll charge to supply it. He's likely to be pleased, and you may get what you're after.
Bill Murry summed it up pretty well, 'Take her around the world--nice and, not so nice places; then decide if you
still want to get married.' (That is if you have the funds?)
Personally, I was told this by an old Sailor. "If she is
willing to live on a boat in order to save up money; You
better marry her. It takes a special type of woman to live
on a boat. If she is willing to put up with the cold, and misery of daily boat life--she is an angel, or really loves your ass?"
meh, I am married to a woman that slept in ditches with me, but the second we got married and had kids, she became someone else. This advice is bullshit.
Take her around the world--nice and, not so nice places; then decide if you still want to get married.
I think that this is the wrong approach.
Anybody is suitable for marriage, on the condition that their culture says that there is no other realistic option than to stay married. That is the reason why both of you will do what it takes to make it work, and believe me that it will work.
In that respect, women from the wrong (western) communities are simply not suitable for marriage. Pick randomly a woman elsewhere and you should be ok.
You post this misogynistic screed knowing full well--or you should, if you're any sort of functioning adult--that end case of what you describe so glowingly is quite often the female partner learning how to hide black eyes or worse. "Western" culture not jamming people together because reasons is a feature, not a bug.
I do not believe that marrying the "wrong person" is fundamentally that common. The problem is rather that it could be simple and easy to divorce someone for the inevitable quirks that you do not want to learn to put with.
That is why I have never considered and would never consider to marry a woman from a mainstream western community. The fact that it is culturally an easy option to move on, turns them into unsuitable marriage material. I would just be getting into an accident waiting to happen.
Prince Charles and lady Diana only divorced because it was culturally acceptable and rather easy to do. Otherwise, they would still be married today. Especially Diana would have learned how to deal with the drawbacks of that, and probably not be more unhappy for it.
As a newly divorced mainstream western person, I might have an anecdotal perspective on this. You don't divorce because of how easy it is. You divorce despite how hard it is. And while the cultural boundaries are reasonable (not encouraging, mind you), it is the finances, the practical things, the emotions, the social consequences that hurt. And, if you have kids, rip their opportunity to live in the same house as both parents.
My divorce was a "good" one. We agreed, and make the best of it together, not just for the kids' sake but for each other's as well. Still, I never wanna do this again.
According to other people I've talked to, the books I've read, and the therapists I've been to, the idea that couples divorce too easily is simply false. I'm sure you can find examples to point to, but, at least around the Nordics, it simply is not the case.
If you marry a woman who would divorce you in a wink, the reason is you not getting to know her beforehand, not some divorce-culture.
"According to other people I've talked to, the books I've read, and the therapists I've been to, the idea that couples divorce too easily is simply false."
I don't think it is about how "easy" it is. It's about when is divorce considered the "right thing"? In the west we often consider divorce the right option based on feelings and desires. Don't settle. You have the right to be happy etc.
My response was, “Everybody’s got baggage. You have to figure out if your baggage and her baggage make a matching set.”
I’ve been married twenty-one years, and neither of us are the same two people who got married all that time ago. There have been times when we’ve discussed if the two people we’ve become should stay married. There’s been times when love is strained, times when things are just comfortable, and times when my heart still beats faster when she walks in the room.
The number one piece of advice that I received that has stood the test of time is being able to communicate. If you are able to share with each other your dreams, fantasies, desires, fears, faults and foibles, you have a relationship that can be built on and can last.